Monthly Archives: September 2016

More on my firm favourite among brewers, Ticketybrew, with particular reference to their bottled beers. This post and the one before it have been a long time coming; it was last Christmas when I set out to buy every Ticketybrew beer I could find for a comprehensive tasting. Unfortunately my sweep of the shops coincided with a problem at the brewery which led to a few bottles with serious infection issues escaping into the wild, a couple of which I eventually bought. When I alerted Keri at the brewery to what had happened she confirmed that they had had problems – which had since been resolved – and very generously offered to replace the beers I’d bought. So this review isn’t going to say anything about the bottled Dunkelweisse or Salted Caramel Coffee Stout, neither of which I tasted at anything near their best.

Ticketybrew do a huge range of beers in bottle – all bottled by hand, and all (as far as I’m aware) bottle-conditioned – so this is going to be a bit of a ‘list post’. First, some bottled beers that are also available on draught (or vice versa). Of the beers I reviewed in the last post, I’ve had the Stout, Jasmine Green Tea Pale, Cherry Berliner Weiss, Coffee Anise Porter, Black IPA, Table IPA and Tripel in bottled form, as well as the Pale and the Blonde. Those two are reliably good – almost as good in bottle as they are on cask. Of the others, the Stout was very nice, the Jasmine Green Tea was rock-solid and the Cherry Berliner Weiss worked well (and I could taste the fruit).

Of Ticketybrew‘s bottle-only beers, I’ve had a number of short-run pale beers: Citra Pale, Antipodean Pale, a 6% IPA and the Grodziskie. These were all 1. pale 2. ‘oppy and 3. nothing short of superb (although the Grodziskie threw half of itself out of the bottle before I could get a glass in range; it’s traditionally a highly-carbonated style, so I’ll give them a pass on that). They were also short runs, some very short – a couple of the bottles I tasted didn’t even have printed labels. I hope they brew some of them again and on a larger scale; I think the 6% IPA, in particular, could do very well.

Flavoured beers abound in their bottled range. I haven’t had the Peach Ice Tea, although it sounds good; I also missed the Rice Pudding (!) on its first outing and hope to see it again some time. Manchester Tart was a very pleasant pale beer flavoured – lightly – with raspberry and coconut; yes, it did work and no, I didn’t think it would. As for the Rhubarb Berliner Weiss, I’d rate it above the Cherry; perhaps it’ll make a comeback.

Then there’s the Dubbel, one of their very first beers. In the past I’ve been slightly ungenerous about the Dubbel, as I realised when I had a Westmalle Dubbel and compared the two. So let me clarify: at its best, Ticketybrew Dubbel isn’t any better than Westmalle. (It isn’t any worse, either.)

That just leaves the Rose Wheat, Flat White (coffee wheat beer) and Munchner. I’ll take them together with a few beers I mentioned earlier but didn’t say much about: the Coffee Anise Porter, Black IPA, Table IPA and Tripel. With all these bottled beers – and with the Pale, Blonde and Dubbel – I’ve had some consistency issues. Remember what I said about the cask beers staling? More than once now, I’ve tasted the Pale and the Blonde and thought “I’m sure it wasn’t quite that sour last time… is it meant to be like that?“; that goes for bottle as well as cask versions. That said, I did ‘tune in’ to the taste of the beer almost immediately; the sharpness that hit me at the outset rapidly became one element of a complex flavour profile. (And that also goes for bottle as well as cask versions.)

I’m a bit more concerned about the others listed – the Coffee Anise Porter, Black IPA, Table IPA, Rose Wheat, Flat White, Munchner, Tripel and even the Dubbel. The contrast between the Tripel in bottle and in its freeze-dried flavour-capsule keg form is striking – I’d love to say that the bottle-conditioned beer has added subtlety and sophistication, but most of what I could taste was added acidity. All these bottled beers are terrific when they’re in good nick, but too often there’s been an extra note of front-of-mouth citric sharpness creeping in, and sometimes creeping right to centre stage. I wondered to begin with if this was down to the bottle conditioning – we all know about how the sugar turns to alcohol… Then I remembered the 10-year-old Chimay Blue that I’d tasted once (courtesy of my younger self): not a sour note in sight.

It’s not a bad line-up; I make that 21 different bottled beers, of which 13 are very good or brilliant. That’s not as good a hit-rate as the cask beers, though – and not all of the 13 are consistently brilliant, sadly.

I’m a big fan of Ticketybrew and have been for some time; they’ve featured in my ‘Golden Pints’ roundup posts for 2013, 2014 and 2015 (in fact I nominated their cask Pale for ‘beer of the year’ as soon as I tasted it, in July 2013). From a cautious, if idiosyncratic, start – two beers, a Dubbel and a Pale, bottle only – they’ve branched out into a bewildering range of styles, for keg and cask as well as bottle. According to my notes I’ve tasted sixteen different Ticketybrew beers on cask, twenty in bottle and three in keg, for a total of 27 styles or variants.

This post will go through the cask and keg beers. To start with some dark ones, I’ve had the Mumme, Coffee Anise Porter, Summer Porter and four (count ’em) Stouts. I’m not the biggest fan of the Coffee Anise Porter, but only because I’m not convinced about the coffee/anise combination; it’s a well-made beer. The Summer Porter is a lovely beer – dark and spicy without seeming heavy. As for the Mumme, you can read about it on Keri’s blog; I thought it tasted of sweet coffee and was rather odd. Interesting, though. The Stout is dense, black and sweetish, calling black treacle to mind (and is in fact flavoured with black treacle). A couple of novelties – Mint Choc Stout and Marmite Stout – overlaid their additional flavours on a similar (but not identical) dark, sweet stout base, and worked amazingly well (and yes, it did taste of Marmite). Then there was the Invalid Stout (c), produced in homage to a nineteenth-century recipe with substantial qualities of liquorice; I liked it a great deal, and I don’t even like liquorice. As for its ‘invalid’ health-giving qualities, my lips are sealed.

One of Ticketybrew‘s flagship beers, the Pale, isn’t actually very pale. Perhaps to make up for this, they’ve brewed some very, very pale beers, although these have mainly been for bottling. The only really pale beer of theirs I’ve had on cask is the Jasmine Green Tea Pale, which is very dry indeed but not sharp-tasting at all; it’s perfumed mainly by the eponymous tea. It’s very refreshing; I tried it once as a novelty and have gone back several times since. They also vary their pale range with fruit-flavoured – and, well, pudding-flavoured – beers, although again these are mainly found in bottle. I’ve tried the Cherry Berliner Weiss on bottle, cask and keg, and can report that a cask Berliner Weiss works better than you might think. The Bitter Orange – only on cask to my knowledge – was terrific: very like the Pale (see below) with a bit of added marmalade oomph.

The final group of draught beers consists of all the ones that aren’t dark, pale or fruit-flavoured. Let’s start with a real world-class beer, Ticketybrew Pale. The first time I had the Pale on cask I just loved it, and I’ve loved it ever since; I’ve loved it fresh and mellow, I’ve loved it at the sharp end of the cask; I’ve loved it at its full strength of 5.5%, in the 4.3% version that they once supplied to a beer festival and even (slightly less) on keg. It’s just a lovely beer. The best way I can think to describe it is that there’s a certain kind of flavour profile you get in some high-strength beers, particularly dark beers – imperial stouts, barley wines, quadrupels; a sense of the flavour of the beer dropping away, as you drink it, and opening out into something bigger and more intense. In terms of flavour, colour and strength, the Pale is in the best bitter or ‘premium bitter’ area, but it also does that. It’s a massive beer (even at 5.5%) – an absolute classic.

The Blonde – smooth, creamy, lightly fruity – isn’t quite as good as the Pale, but it’s close. I have very fond memories of a session with a German friend on the Blonde, although at 5.6% it’s not really a session beer (as I realised the next morning). It’s a bit lighter and perhaps a bit less complex than the Pale, but with the same sense of ‘opening out’, of giving you a bit more flavour than you bargained for.

The Golden Bitter is a really nice, old-school amber bitter with a Landlord-ish diacetyl edge to it. Like the Pale – and the Blonde for that matter – the Golden Bitter is definitely a beer that stales, not to put too fine a point on it: when you go back on day 2 or day 3, you will absolutely not get the same mellowness that you got on day 1. Oxidation or something else? Either way, it’s not necessarily a defect; it’s not the kind of harsh, overwhelming sourness that tells you the barrel’s going off, more a shifting element of the beer’s flavour profile (sweetish gradually turning sharpish).

The Black IPA and Table IPA have been terrific when I’ve had them on cask; there’s an odd sort of mellow dryness underlying the resin (BIPA) and the old books (TIPA), which in both cases makes for a really drinkable beer. Last of all, the Tripel on keg was absolutely superb; I’ve had Belgian tripels on draught, and this is worthy to stand alongside them.

I’ll draw some conclusions at the end of the second post, when I’ve said something about the bottled range. For now, a quick running total: I make that 19 beers (with some double-counting for cask and keg), of which I’d class 10 as good and 9 as very good. Duncan Barton isn’t the kind of brewer who does conference keynotes and gets his picture in CRAFT magazine – more the kind who quietly gets on with it – but he and Keri are producing some absolutely stunning cask and keg beers.